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Unless they have finally made it faster than Safari, I don’t see a niche for it. Firefox is very expandable and full-featured; Safari is blinding fast. Maybe Chrome’s niche is “decently fast and provides lots of data directly back to Google for them to mine”?

This is just further proof that browser benchmarks, especially those that mostly just test javascript performance, are useless. A 35% increase sounds pretty impressive, until you realize that web-browsing isn’t all about javascript.

In real-world use, I don’t really notice any difference in speed moving between Firefox nightly builds and Chrome’s Dev channel releases. If anything, Firefox is often faster, because of extensions like Adblock and NoScript. (I know that Chrome has extensions, too, but they’re not as good.) However, more significantly, I do notice that Chrome uses WAY more memory than Firefox does. That, and a bug in Chrome that, when maximized, causes it to cover the taskbar makes Chrome a no-go on my netbook (where the extra javascript speed might actually be useful, given the slow Atom processor).

The truth of the matter is that the speed and latency of most internet connections is the real bottleneck. For all it’s last-place performance in benchmarks, even IE8 performs almost identically to all other browsers in real-world scenarios, because the time it takes to download a page is getting to be longer than it takes to actually render the page.

So, for me, the only meaningful way to assess a browser’s worth isn’t in benchmarks. It’s all about the interface, the features, and the extensibility. In those areas, Chrome does pretty well, but still doesn’t compete with a thoroughly-customized Firefox.